Our newsletter this week features the photograph above, which perfectly captures the colors and textures of Minnesota in fall, taken by Megan Mayer on a recent getaway Up North, to Gooseberry Falls State Park. Mayer is a choreographer, performing artist and photographer based in Minneapolis. She says she’s “drawn to the peripheries of performance… the […]

Our newsletter this week features the photograph above, which perfectly captures the colors and textures of Minnesota in fall, taken by Megan Mayer on a recent getaway Up North, to Gooseberry Falls State Park.

Mayer is a choreographer, performing artist and photographer based in Minneapolis. She says she’s “drawn to the peripheries of performance… the moment when someone starts or stops performing and where that switch lives in the body.” She describes her dance-making as a process inspired by the power of still images and cinematic scenes, saying that her photography is inextricably linked to her creative work in dance. She’s fantastic as an ensemble performer, adept at mining the chemistry of a cast and deploying their strengths and talents to great effect in her choreography. She says she “favors a detailed sensibility over virtuosity” and is primarily “interested in who is doing the moving, and how and why they in particular navigate tasks and interactions.”

“Soft Fences,” photo by Al Hall, courtesy of MANCC.

Mayer was a recent artist-in-residence at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (MANCC) in Tallahassee, Florida, through a pilot partnership with The McKnight Foundation in collaboration with Springboard for the Arts. She is also a recipient of a 2010 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Choreographers, as well as a 2010 Jerome Foundation Travel Study Grant which she used to work with New York dance artist Douglas Dunn.

Megan Mayer in “Over Time,” a performance work for “Cubicle,” a web-based series by Skewed Visions. Photo by the artist.

Megan Mayer can regularly be seen on stage with Charles Campbell, Angharad Davies, Emily Johnson, Mad King Thomas, Kevin Obsatz, Karen Sherman, Laurie Van Wieren and Chris Yon. Her dances have been commissioned by The Southern Theater, The Walker Art Center and the Minnesota History Center, and she has a growing body of work of dances made for film. She holds a B.A. in Dance from the University of Minnesota.

Relevant performances and related links:

Soft Fences, a new work currently in process, was presented, in part, at the Minnesota Contemporary Presenters’ Platform in September. Soft Fences explores the euphoria and terror of space travel as a metaphor for personal change, investigating imagery of isolation and the disquieting emotional experience of being stuck in transition between gravity and momentum. The project has been created with a production team consisting of Charles Campbell, Angharad Davies, Elliott Durko Lynch, Kevin Obsatz, Stephanie Stoumbelis and Greg Waletski; the work was developed during her MANCC residency.

Coming up: a remount of 2010’s You might be expecting me, a solo she choreographed for Nic Lincoln is slated for May 2013 at the Tek Box at Cowles Center for Performing Arts. Mayer is also working on a new duet by Angharad Davies which will be performed at her show in June 2013 at the Red Eye.